Headley Heath

 An occasional series of blog posts finding tenuous wargaming connections to my local walks...

As it is the May Day Bank Holiday weekend here we decided to avoid our local park as it was busy with a weekend Fair and headed off with the dogs to Headley Heath.  This is only a few miles from home in the Surrey countryside but I haven't been here for years.

It's a huge expanse of woods and chalk heathland stretching for miles and the kind of place that never seems too busy.  Needless to say the dogs loved it and we managed to avoid meeting the cattle that graze the heathland... I'm not sure how that encounter would have gone!

Cisco inspecting evidence of cows!

So, is there a tenuous wargames connection?  As it turns out, quite a lot... and most of it I'd been unaware of.

During WW2 the Heath was used by the Canadian army for training... most of the main paths are ones that they constructed and there are noticeable lumps and bumps in the terrain as evidence of their engineering practice.  A lot of this stretch of Surrey was used to billet the Canadians and their Divisional HQ was close to Headley.

Bellasis House

Also on the Heath was Bellasis House.  This was a training site for the SOE and trained numerous agents, most notably Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in Operation Anthropoid.

The site also trained a group I'd never heard of... the BONZOS.  These were anti-Nazi prisoners of war who were screened and trained at Headley before being sent back into Germany and Austria.  Notably some were dropped into Austria to secure works of art

In 1941 2 Allied bombers crashed at Headley on the same night... both were limping back from raids but had sustained damage.  The first, a Wellington from 159 sqdn managed to land safe, wrecking the plane but with all crew surviving.  The 2nd plane, a Hampden from 44 (Rhodesia) Sqdn wasn't so lucky.  The crew had to bail out but the pilot was unable to get clear and was killed in the crash.

Finally the site had been an air observation site since 1937 and was designated a 'Granite' site... equipped with flares it would warn incoming planes of nearby high ground.  The Heath is close to Box Hill and the line of Surrey Hills that run east-west.  Post war, it was re-sited and became an Orlit observation post and then an underground nuclear observation post until 1968 when the number of posts was reduced.